Frank Bitterlich

I wonder what brand of dictionary the folks over in Redmond are using. But until now, the word “stable” had a pretty well-defined meaning for me. Not so any more… This is a quote from Simon Aldous, manager with the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Ltd. (UK):

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

(Emphasis added by me)

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By reading one press release after another from various players in the IT industry (none of which, amazingly, contained the word “sorry”) about different kinds of stupid blunders unexpected features, I got the distinct feeling that we seriously need to regulate the corporate PR departments a bit more.

Here`s my first suggestion…:

Terms that should be banned from press releases and advertising by the IT industry…:

1. “limited number”

   As used in: “Only a limited number of customers have been affected by the problem…”

   My suggestion: Replace limited with finite. Closer to the truth, but still implying that at least one customer didn`t have his OS completely destroyed by a careless blunder in the product.

2. “up to”

   As in “… bandwidth of up to 16 Gbit/s…”

   Suggestion: replace “up to xxx” with “you will never see xxx, but we will bill you for that anyway.”

3. “committed to”

   As in, “… we are committed to continuously improving the security of our products…”

   Suggestion: Replace “committed to xxx” with “we couldn`t care less about xxx, but we would never be caught saying that in a press release.”

If you want to participate in this kind of bullshit bingo a bit, here`s some suggested reading:

• McAfee false alert snares innocent JavaScript files, The Register
• CA auto-immune update trashes systems, The Register
• AVG slaps Trojan label on Adobe Flash, The Register
• TomTom admits Satnav device is infected with virus, DaniWeb

Any more suggestions? Feel free to post a comment…